tuipod

A TUI-based Podcast Player

Overview

In the never-ending quest to find the "perfect" podcast player, I often try to create my own.

This particular endeavor follows a particularly mediocre experiment using ChatGPT to see how far towards a functional application I could get.

This implementation utilizes Python and Textual -- but no ChatGPT.

Features

• discover podcasts through iTunes-based search
• play podcast episodes directly from source
• pause podcasts during play
• maintain a podcast subscription list
• more (still in development)

Installation and Running

You must:

• have Python installed
• have pip installed (if not included with Python)
• Use:
  • a virtual environment
  • or, install Python modules from your environment (e.g. apt repository)
  • or, use --break-system-packages

If you are using Windows, you may need the Visual Studio Build Tools to build miniaudio during the pip install.

$ git clone https://github.com/mwhickson/tuipod.git
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python -m tuipod

Also provided are batch (tuipod.bat) and shell (tuipod.sh) files to simplify calling python -m tuipod.

Usage Guide

• type search criteria into the search box and press ENTER to fetch and display podcast results
  • if no errors occur and podcast results are found, focus will automatically shift to podcast list
• select a podcast item of interest and press ENTER to fetch and display a list of episodes for the selected podcast
  • if no errors occur and episode results are found, focus will automatically shift to the episode list
• select an episode item of interest and press ENTER to begin playing the episode
  • if no errors occur, the episode will being playing (the play button text will change to pause and the button will become green)

Additional keyboard shortcuts:

• ESC will close a modal window
• F1 will show the About dialog
• TAB and SHIFT+TAB will move the cursor focus between sections (e.g. search, podcast list, and episode list)
• CTRL+C will quit the application
• CTRL+P will show the textual command palette
• when a podcast is selected:
  • S will subscribe to the podcast
  • U will unsubscribe from the podcast
• when an episode is selected:
  • I will show the episode information
  • SPACE will toggle between episode playing/paused state

NOTE: Some keystrokes depend on application state (e.g. not actively searching, episode playing, etc.)

Screenshots

Linux Screenshot

Reflection

Having just done something with near feature-parity using ChatGPT, I thought I'd note some thoughts about the differences between the experiment.

During development of tuipod, I purposely did not reference the ChatGPT player code.

• it took longer to put it together manually (not really a surprise)
• given the state of some of the documentation for the projects used, ChatGPT's implementation is, in hindsight, more impressive
• I got what I wanted with the manual approach, and will be able to more easily update and refine what I have, which is not something I can say about the ChatGPT product

Overall, I am much happier with the manual implementation of tuipod.

License

MIT License